by Logan Jacobs
“I don’t know!” I crawled over to Fela and laid my head on her chest, I could feel her warm breasts rise and fall against my cheek and hear the low purr of her breathing, but when I raised my head her eyes were still closed. “She’s alive. That means she’s going to make it, right?”
“I think so.” Emma glanced up toward the sky. “Unless this damned storm tries again before we leave!”
I looked up to see flashes of yellow lightning arcing across the clear blue sky from branch to branch, like a dream catcher woven from electrical charge.
Honest Abe started to creak. His chassis rocked back and forth, slowly at first and then much faster. His hood rose up, slammed back down onto the DEPP’s panel, then flew up again and strained on its hinges toward the sky.
“I think it wants energy!” I stood and staggered toward the cart, where the bike I'd insisted on bringing strained against the pipe stuck in its wheels. I reached toward the handlebars, then pulled my hand back as a tiny spark zapped at my fingertips. “Fuck, I can’t touch it. Emma, we gotta feed it the bike! It’s full of potential energy.”
“How?” Emma grabbed a rake by its wooden handle, inserted it through the bike’s frame, and grimaced as she levered the bike up from the cart. Once she’d pulled the bike’s frame free of the crates, she rested the rake’s handle on the boxes, tilted the handle down, and grabbed the bike by its frame as it slid toward her. She dropped the rake, then set the bike’s wheels on the ground. “Should I just toss it outside of the circle?”
“Aim the bike, pull out the pipe, and let the fucker go.” I scooted away from Honest Abe’s creaking metal chassis and desperately hoped that my intuition about the glow cloud’s hunger was right. I didn’t know if a roving cluster of lightning bolts had anything like a consciousness or if it was just a swirling mass attracted to the biggest cloud of energy it could drift after, but I couldn’t think of any other way to deal with the storm.
“Here goes.” Emma took a deep breath, wrapped her hand around the pipe sticking out of the bike’s front wheel, and yanked it out of the spokes. She jumped back as the bike shot away out of her hands. “Oh!”
The ball of lightning bolts immediately zapped away after the bicycle. It left a trail of glowing embers through the leafy canopy, and as I glanced back over my shoulder I realized that the forest behind us was starting to flicker with orange flames. The self-mobile lightning storm might have left us alone, but now we were surrounded by the beginnings of a forest fire.
Floppy whimpered, stamped his feet, and reached down with the end of his trunk to pat Fela’s cheek.
“Floppy?” Fela sat up and blinked her brilliant yellow eyes. “Dave Meyer? Did we defeat the lightning?”
“Fela!” I darted over to Fela and knelt down in the dirt by her side. “Yeah, we did. We’re gonna be fine.”
“What smells like fire?” Fela raised her head and sniffed. Her eyes widened and her ears pressed back against her head as she stared at the trail of orange flames. “We are going to die!”
“No, we’re not!” Emma knelt in the dirt next to me and smiled down at Fela. “The machine is going to get us out of here soon, isn’t that right?”
“Uh, yeah.” I looked down at my watch as the fire started to creep sideways through the canopy and the light started to fade to orange. “Thirty seconds to go. Twenty-nine... twenty-eight...”
“I am ready to leave this world behind, Dave Meyer.” Fela leaned forward, wrapped her muscular arms around me, and laid her head on my chest. She started to purr as I lifted my hand to stroke her auburn hair. “I hope the next world has no fire at all.”
“Here’s to a better world,” Emma sighed. She wrapped her arms around my waist, rested her chin on my shoulder, and pressed her cheek against mine as my watch started to beep.
“Nine... eight...” I coughed as a cloud of smoke drifted into my face. I could hear the crackling of fire on wood now, and I just hoped that we wouldn’t bring any fiery trees with us. “Three... two... one... Happy New Year!”
The DEPP’s engine started to whine. The whine rose higher as the forest around us faded into a pure white glow of light.
We had left the dying electrical world behind, and for all I knew we were spinning around between time and space while Sol’s parallel universe machine reached for a new reality.
There were infinite universes to explore.
I had a cart full of supplies, two gorgeous girls, a woolly mammoth, and a Dimensional Engine, Patent Pending.
I had no idea what kind of crazy world we’d end up in… but I couldn’t wait to find out.
End of book 1
End Notes
Thanks for reading Monster Girl Base! I’ll start writing book 2 when this book gets 100 reviews, so please leave a review right here. Thank you!
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2020 by Logan Jacobs